The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 73 Algae Cultivation Plan
  The fastest swordfish-shaped Hed shrimp has swam to the front of the floating mother nest of the Strawhorn nest group, and used its sharp sword-like protrusions to kill several adult Strawhorns that were pushing the Straight horned stone floating mother nest forward. Stopped its movement.

The fearless soldiers who came later waved their sickles and attacked the huge body of the floating brood nest. Yellow-brown tissue fluid of unknown composition surged out, causing his body to be torn apart entirely.

Immediately, Lin Yi's floating mother nest slowly moved forward, pushed by the filtering mother worms, put down the worms attached to the whisker-like tissue under her body, and began to sweep up the garbage on the seabed.

At the same time, the floating mother nest of the anomalocaridids nest group also slowly came through the waves driven by ordinary anomalocaridids.

Since the genetic sequence was donated by Lin Yi, the floating mother nest of the Anomalocaris nest also looks like a graptolite.

But perhaps to simplify the structure, there are not so many whisker-like structures under their floating mother nests, but only a huge body floating on the water under the vesicle support.

At the same time, perhaps because the Anomalocaris nest group is different from Lin Yi's group, all levels of the other group are active swimming creatures, unlike Lin Yi's group, which has limited swimming ability. They also simplify filling the vesicles with water to control the mother's nest's ability to float and sink in the water.

This means that the floating mother nest of the Anomalocaris nest can only float above the water, releasing ordinary Anomalocaris to touch the seabed, and bring food remains back to the mother nest for absorption by the mother nest.

But for them, this is not a disadvantage.

Therefore, when picking up garbage, Lin Yi controlled the floating mother nest to inject water into the vesicle and let it slowly fall to the seabed. However, the anomalocaridid ​​nest group directly let the accompanying ordinary anomalocaridids break away from the mother nest and start gnawing below. Eaten the corpse.

Workers and ordinary anomalies shuttled back and forth, and the battlefield was quickly cleaned up by the two nests. It was pitiful for the trilobites who came to pick up garbage. On that day, they once again recalled the time when they were raped by the old archer. Fear dominated by anomalocaridids predators.

After the control workers had a brief exchange with the three-eyed Hed shrimp, the forces of the two nest groups temporarily separated and established a new fixed mother nest nearby as a base.

More second-generation reconnaissance mothers will use the corpses of the dead individuals of the Straight-horned Stone Nest Group to be produced, and continue to spread out to explore the traces of the Straight-horned Stone Nest Group.

In the process of searching for enemies before this battle, the echolocation system proved to be very effective, which made Lin Yi plan to continue the production of second-generation reconnaissance drones.

The second-generation pioneer mother slowly lays out a huge egg that will turn into a pupa and become a mother nest. The worker colonies are concentrated nearby, ready to begin providing nutrients to the new mother nest.

On the other hand, the Anomalocaris nest group still uses the method of pupating into a mother nest.

A swordfish-shaped Hurd shrimp, which was huge compared to ordinary soldiers and ordinary anomalocaridids, slowly landed on the seabed and began to pupate. The honeycomb structure gradually took shape, and the cluster structure of the Sea Ringo from Lin Yi also began to grow slowly.

But this time, Lin Yi planned to build some new structures to further increase the nutrient output of the nest, except for the ringworm clusters and the large crinoid.

This is one of the reasons why Lin Yi generously donated the genetic structure related to the Ringo cluster to the Anomalocaris nest group. He planned to develop a better structure that produces nutrients.

In his imagination, once this plan is successful, he will no longer need to specifically select an area with rich food to pupate into a mother nest, but will be able to spread its branches and leaves wherever the sun shines, even in the most barren sea areas.

Lin Yi had previously tried to absorb the genetic sequences of plants, but failed without exception.

The genetic sequences of animals and plants are very different and cannot be easily integrated. In later generations, there was a sea slug that could obtain chlorophyll from algae and use it to complete photosynthesis independently.

But these days, let alone specific types of sea slugs, the Typhon monster, the ancestor of the swimming gastropod niche, has not appeared, and Lin Yi can't conjure one out of thin air.

However, the inability to integrate does not mean that it cannot be utilized.

In a small-scale extinction event known as the Younger Dryas event 1.2 years ahead of Lin Yi's time, human ancestors survived that extinction event by relying on the use of plants, or symbiosis with plants. events and developed the achievements of later generations.

That is agriculture. The Agricultural Revolution further increased the number of people that could be fed in an area of ​​the same area, and was the foundation for all subsequent civilizational progress.

Currently, the fixed filter feeding method used by Lin Yi's nest colony can be regarded as half agriculture in a sense, but it is still not the optimal solution.

Nowadays, the number of fearless soldiers has greatly expanded and a large number of reconnaissance mothers have been released to search for traces of the spiral stone nests, making Lin Yi's current food resources gradually unable to sustain rapid development.

And his current thoughts are very simple. Since the genetic sequence of the plant cannot be integrated into the genetic sequence of the mother nest, let the mother nest and the plant coexist symbiotically, that is, develop agriculture in the true sense!

The mother nest is open to food resources, so there is no need to choose species that are easy to digest and absorb. You only need to consider the proliferation rate and nutrient content.

This is divided into two schemes, one is macro-algae, such as the green hair algae in the Dikla crater before, and the other is algae composed of single cells or a small number of multi-cell colonies such as chlorella in later generations.

The advantage of the former is that it is easy to collect, while the advantage of the latter is that it proliferates quickly and has strong environmental adaptability, and can adapt to seawater with different salinities and different compositions.

And this is also the most terrible thing about macroalgae such as green hair algae. The number and species outside the Dikla crater are rare, and the species in the Dikla crater cannot adapt to the environment with higher salinity.

Gene editing capabilities are also ineffective for plants. If you want to cultivate macroalgae that can tolerate normal environmental salinity, you can only use traditional selective breeding methods, which is a bit troublesome for Lin Yi.

Therefore, after some thought, he still planned to use single-cell phytoplankton as the culture object.

Since the new structure will be more complex and will use a large number of echinoderm gene sequences, it can only be edited using the gene sequence template of the mother's nest as the basic template.

Therefore, the new structure will be treated as an extension of the mother nest rather than as an independent level.

Despite this, in order to facilitate the collection and cultivation of single-cell algae, Lin Yi still tried his best to develop a new structure that can cultivate single-cell algae based on the existing genetic sequence template.

The first such structure began its first proliferation and experiment in this area, and then prepared to spread, or promote, to the entire territory.

(End of this chapter)